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Tuesday, May 7, 2013

Sprouted Wheat Bread Recipe

Have you ever had sprouted wheat bread? It’s known most commonly as that
biblical quoting stuff they sell in the freezer at your local health
food store– Ezekiel bread. I have always loved the stuff, it’s the only
packaged bread that remotely interests me. It’s supposed to be much more
nutritious than bread made from plain flour, and I do believe that’s
true, but my real draw is taste and texture– Ezekiel bread has a rich,
fresh wheat flavor and nubby texture that I just adore.

The only problem (apart from the price) is that, like any real
bread, it gets stale quick and therefore the store has to keep it in
the freezer. Being in the freezer, not very many people think to buy it
and it sometimes sits in there for a loooong time. It’s almost always so
dry that you have to toast it to be able to eat it, and I have even had
a few loaves that were literally dehydrated around the edges.
I had wanted to try making my own sprouted wheat bread for years–
fresh, moist and affordable! But you need to have a way to grind the
sprouted “berries.” It takes either a meat grinder or a food processor
(a grain grinder only works on dry grain), so when I finally
got a food processor for my birthday two years ago sprouted bread topped
my list of uses. I spent a few months experimenting
and got some almost, but not quite awesome results. There were a fair
number of inedibley dense loaves though and I eventually gave it up.
To make sprouted grain bread, first you soak wheat berries overnight
in plenty of water. Then you drain off the water and leave to “sprout,”
6-24 hours or more depending on the temperature. You aren’t sprouting
nearly to the degree you might imagine, just watching for the grain to
split open at one end and the little white tails to poke out.
When the grains are ready you grind them in either a food processor
or meat grinder, and that is when the miracle occurs. First it just
looks like a bunch of chopped up wheat berries, but as the grain is
chopped finer and finer the gluten is released and suddenly it becomes a
cohesive mass of (very nubby) dough.
Part of the reason my loaves were coming out too heavy during my
initial run of obsessive trailing, was that my food processor was just
not getting enough of the grains ground fine enough before a dough
formed, and so not enough gluten was being released. I was getting an
extremely coarse bread, essentially chopped grains with just enough
gluten to hold them all together, but not enough to sustain much real
rising power. The heaviness was daunting, but I do adore bread with real
texture and the flavor was amazing– so purely wheat. I felt the golden bell of perfection ring siren-like in my ear. I knew somehow, someday I would need to master this bread.
Several months ago, in the wake of our cancer scare, I bought a big
fancy masticating (grinding) juicer ostensibly to make My Man healthful
juice. What I have really ended up using and loving it for is sprouted
wheat bread! You just remove the screen to turn it into a food grinder,
and it does a beautiful job, getting a much finer grind than the food
processor. It’s easier to use and easier to clean. I have made a few
perfect loaves, and hardly any inedible ones. Overall, a great success.

But! You probably don’t have a masticating juicer laying around,
right? (If you do, see below) Fear not, for although my juicer gave me
the motivation to get back at my sprouted bread technique, I have since
learned a few things and even figured out how to transfer my improved
recipe and technique to the food processor. All for you, dear few people
who have the time and inclination to fret about such things!
The absolute most important part of making sprouted grain bread is
getting just the right amount of sprouting going on. As the grain wakes
up and pushes that first little rootlet out, it converts the complex
carbohydrates into simple sugars to feed the emerging plant. If you let
the grain sprout too much, there isn’t enough starch structure left to
support bread, and your loaf will be very, very heavy and gummy and not
good at all. I read several recipes that said to let the sprout grow to
anything from 1/4 inch to “the length of the grain.” Unless I am missing
something, this is purely bogus and tragically misleading. From my
experience over the last several months, anything over a 1/8th inch is not worth even using**
Watch your grain closely for the first few times. The soaked grain
won’t do anything at all for the first few or several hours, then you
will see each grain split open just a little at one end and reveal the
white inside. A small tip or protrusion will start to bulge out (we are
talking very, very tiny here). At this point the process starts to move
much faster so keep a close eye. Longer sprouting time makes for a
sweeter, fuller flavor but it also makes the bread gummier and heavier,
this is a very fine balancing point which I am still navigating. You can
actually make very good bread any time after the grain splits open, but
I believe the magical perfect moment occurs sometime after the
emergence of a visible tip or tail and before it reaches 1/8th inch in
length.

I recommend starting this process in the morning, then you can soak
all day, let the grain sit and think about things overnight, then watch
closely for sprouting throughout the next day. If you see the grain
split open right before bedtime, morning is too far away to let the
sprouting continue. Trust me. Put the whole bowl in the fridge
and take it out again in the morning to restart the process. This works
just fine and saves a potential botched loaf.
**If you really get into this sprouted bread, you will at some point
let the sprouting process get away from you. You’ll suddenly remember
your grain after coffee the next morning and run panicking into the
kitchen. The tails will be winding down through the mesh sieve looking
for dirt. Don’t dump the bowl out for chickens (although they would love
you for it, and it’s hardly a loss) just whiz the sprouts up in the
food processor and freeze in four approximately cup sized portions. You
can add these into a recipe of regular flour based bread and they work
just fine, adding great flavor and texture.

Other than timing, my main improvement has come from using a small
portion of white flour. I use about 75% sprouted wheat (by dry weight)
and 25% white flour. I realize this could get some Ezekiel panties in a
bunch, but I’m no purist. I just want to make delicious toothsome bread
that can truly fill my belly for breakfast, eggs optional. This is the
stuff. So damned satisfying, on an almost primal level.
Please note that I do not recommend trying this recipe unless you are
already a seasoned bread baker. Sorry. It is quite a bit more tricky
than making bread from flour, with a much wider possibility for error.
Might I recommend my Cherry Popper Recipe instead? If you are a
seasoned bread maker, and you find the whole process as fascinating as
me, check out my two part series on 20 years of recipe-less whole wheat
bread baking Bread Every Day, Part One: Ingredients and Part Two: Technique.

Approaching Perfection Sprouted Wheat Bread

2 cups hard red or hard white wheat berries

1/4 cup lentils

2 Tablespoons flax seeds

1/2 cup milk

1 teaspoon yeast

1-2 Tablespoons honey

3/4 – 1+ cups white bread flour

1 teaspoon salt

big squirt flax oil

Soak wheat, lentils and flax seeds in plenty of water for about eight hours. Drain through a fine meshed sieve, rinse thoroughly,
and leave the grain in the sieve, set over a bowl and covered. Rinse
again before you go to bed and take a close look at the grain. You
probably won’t see any signs of sprouting yet, if you do, stick the
whole thing in the fridge for the night.
In the morning, rinse and check your grain again. If you have to
leave the house and you are concerned your grain might sprout too much
in your absence, or if it’s ready but you aren’t ready to make the dough, just stick it in the fridge and continue later.
Whenever both you and the wheat are ready, begin with the recipe.
Warm the milk to child-bath temperature, stir in the yeast and let
sit five minutes. Pour half the milk into your food processor, add half
the sprouted grain (unless you have a commercial size processor you will
have to do this in two batches, annoying but true) and turn it on. It
will take several minutes per batch, first it will look like this:

Then like this:

And finally you will see lots of good gluten strands and a real (albeit wet and chunky) dough forming, like this:

Transfer the first batch to a stand mixer or large bowl, and process
the remaining grain, mixed with the other half of the milk/yeast.
When it’s all done, pour the honey, salt and oil on top of the mushy
dough, then add the 3/4 cup of white bread flour. Mix on low for a few
minutes, or hand knead for 5. Add more flour as necessary to make a
moderately soft dough (it will be very sticky, in fact I haven’t tried
this by hand, it might be challenging… But resist the temptation to add
too much flour or your dough will be stiff and your loaf dry)
Let rise for an hour or two, until a finger poke does not bounce
back. (Keep in mind, both now and when rising the loaf that this dough
doesn’t have nearly as much gluten as a flour based dough, so it won’t
rise nearly as high.) Pat the dough out into a rough rectangle and roll
up into a tight log the length of your bread pan. Butter the pan
generously and nestle the dough in. Cover with plastic and let rise for
45 minutes to an hour and a half, or until just shy of the
finger poke spring back test. Turn the oven on to 350 F about halfway
through the rising process. Bake for 50-60 minutes, or until golden
brown and hollow sounding when thumped. Remove from the pan and wrap the
hot loaf in a clean tea towel to keep the crust from getting too hard.
Allow to cool for at least 20 minutes before slicing! No cheating,
you’ll gum up the bread slicing it too soon.
Like all real bread, this will only last a few days sitting out on
the counter. Store in the fridge to keep up to a week, or slice and
freeze if you want it to last longer.

The Juicer Story

With the threat of radiation therapy hanging
in our future several months ago, I researched and bought a $300
masticating juicer. I was convinced that I was going to start making
healthful carrot-apple juices for My Man, and start growing and juicing
wheatgrass, all of which are cancer fighting goodness. I read a lot
about juicers in a fear induced researching bender, trying in my little
way I suppose to feel like I had any control whatsoever over the
outcome.
I admit that, even as I entered my credit card information, I knew on
some level that I would not use the juicer to make juice. Sometimes I
just get it into my head that I have to do or buy something and
I cannot rest until the deed is done. Not surprising to anyone, least
of all me– my juicing days didn’t last more than a few weeks. Cutting up
all those apples and carrots was a lot of work! And watching the juice
go undrunk in the fridge just about killed me. But I patted myself
reassuringly on the back with the idea that, given my circumstances,
wasting $300 on something that I had hoped would help My Man’s health
was entirely forgivable.
Plus, I had a fall back plan. Or perhaps it was an ulterior motive.
Because I bought a very high quality masticating juicer, it doubles as a
food grinder, you just have to remove the screen. Grinding sprouted grain for bread dough is much more effective than chopping it into oblivion in the food processor, and my Omega J8004 Juicer
;has
become a workhorse of an entirely different color. I’m guessing that it
works better than a meat grinder and might be the perfect home power
tool for sprouted wheat bread.
If you too would like to try using a masticating juicer to grind
sprouted wheat, you can pretty much follow the recipe above. The Omega
8004 has a special extra hard auger, the manual specified that you could
grind grain in it (though, I would be afraid to try it on un-sprouted
dry grain) and it has a 15 year warranty. I’m not sure I’d try
using a lesser juicer unless I didn’t care if it broke, or had specific
okay from the manufacturer. Sprouted grain is obviously not what these
things were designed for, though it is surprisingly smashable once
sprouted, you can even chew the grains.
The grinding is very straightforward, just pour the sprouted grain in
a little bit at a time– don’t fill the hopper or it can get bogged
down. Interestingly, the bogging down doesn’t happen when the grains are
more sprouted, then I can fill the hopper and even plunge it down, and
they go through fine. But it definitely happens when the grain is on the
less sprouted side of things. Just go slow at first while you figure
things out.

I put mine through twice. After the first grind it is still pretty
chunky, though probably as good as the food processor. After the second
grind it comes out as a hollow dough tube. I like to put the warm milk
and yeast into my Kitchen-Aid bowl, then grind the wheat in on top of
it. After the first grind, I scoop up the majority of the wheat one
handful at a time to re-grind. Then I add the flour, salt, honey and oil
and mix it on low for 10 minutes.
If you want to make 100% sprouted wheat bread, I would recommend a third grind to really release the maximum amount of gluten.
Enjoy your primal bread experience, and please leave a comment telling me it how it goes for you!